BRIC helping US Exports:Geithner

Rapid growth of emerging economies like India, China and Brazil is boosting American exports and raising incomes and jobs across the US, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has said.

“Emerging economies like China, Brazil and India are growing very rapidly. That growth is helping to support rapid growth in US exports which in turn is raising income and employment across the United States in manufacturing and high tech and agriculture,” he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Thursday.

This is Ludic Fallacy, at best. This is too simplistic a view to take on such a complicated issue.

The ludic fallacy is a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan. “Ludic” is from the Latin ludus, meaning “play, game, sport, pastime.”[1] It is summarized as “the misuse of games to model real-life situations.”[2] Taleb explains the fallacy as “basing studies of chance on the narrow world of games and dice.”[3]

It is a central argument in the book and a rebuttal of the predictive mathematical models used to predict the future – as well as an attack on the idea of applying naïve and simplified statistical models in complex domains. According to Taleb, statistics only work in some domains like casinos in which the odds are visible and defined. Taleb’s argument centers on the idea that predictive models are based on platonified forms, gravitating towards mathematical purity and failing to take some key ideas into account:
it is impossible to be in possession of all the information.
very small unknown variations in the data could have a huge impact. Taleb does differentiate his idea from that of mathematical notions in chaos theory, e.g. the butterfly effect.
theories/models based on empirical data are flawed, as events that have not taken place before cannot be accounted for.

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